<div 10="" 2017="" _ngcontent-c23="" innerhtml=" The way I see it, marketing and advertising strategies can be split into two main categories: long-term and short-term. Short-term strategies are ideal if you need to build traffic or sales quickly; for a set amount of money, you can place and ad or distribute a message that leads to an immediate, but finite influx of new interested customers. Long-term strategies, on the other hand, require more investment—both in time and in money. They don’t usually allow you to see results right away, but over time, their effectiveness grows, ultimately leading to a higher long-term ROI and a better capacity to sustain themselves. So what’s the best long-term online marketing strategy? SEO Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of my personal favorite strategies. It’s the process of optimizing your website (and off-site targets) to increase your rankings and visibility in search engines. This increase in rankings will result in more traffic and, hopefully, more revenue. It’s advantageous because of its: Flexibility. Your strategic direction in SEO is usually dictated by the types of keywords you want to target and the type of visibility you want to earn. Since pretty much everybody uses search engines as a conduit for their eventual online interactions, this makes SEO an enormously flexible strategy. You can use it for almost any business in any industry, and customize it to your needs. Targeting. SEO is also advantageous because of its precision. Though you’ll be in the dark about certain subjective metrics, like your exact domain authority, you can track your rankings and scrutinize meticulous details about your audience. Sustained authority. The authority you build in your SEO campaign is permanent. You’ll continue reaping results of your efforts even after you’ve ended your campaign. Content Marketing Content marketing serves as an excellent...

The right web design tools can streamline your workflow, helping you work smarter – rather than harder – and more efficiently. After all, you want to invest your energy in solving problems, delighting users and creating beautiful designs. You don’t want to waste it on dull, repetitive and soul-sapping tasks. Thankfully, new web design tools are being released all the time to help you simplify processes, and reduce time and effort – most notably in UI design. Here, we look at 30 brilliant web design tools for 2018 that will help you become more productive in the coming year. Some are brand spanking new; others have been around for a while. But all have the potential to save you time, energy and budget in your web design projects. 01. Sketch We’ll start with the most obvious. Yes, we know everyone’s heard of Sketch – Bohemian Coding’s vector UI design tool – but anecdotally it seems there are still a lot of web designers relying on Photoshop for UI design (and that’s despite the release of Adobe XD, Adobe’s shiny new prototyping and wireframing tool – one of the newest additions to Creative Cloud – which comes in second on this list). Rory Berry, creative director at Superrb, rightly feels that using Photoshop for web design is a mistake. He made the switch to Sketch in 2017, and highly recommends it. “Having been a user of Photoshop for over 10 years, it was hard to change and learn something new,” he says. “But literally after the first day of using Sketch, there was no looking back. I’m a total convert.” He offers a number of reasons why. “Compared to Photoshop, sorting all your documents that you have and making revisions on Sketch is much easier,” he begins. “Sketch has small documents...

Stoney G deGeyter 1.8K READS One of my biggest frustrations about SEO is having the responsibility for a client’s online success without having the control over everything that is required to make them successful. Get a handful of SEO professionals and digital marketers in a room and you’ll likely hear this as their number one complaint. Clients expect their web marketers to drive new business and traffic, while at the same time they won’t do what’s necessary to achieve those results. Now before I go any further, this isn’t going to be a scapegoat post. There are times when the lack of success falls squarely on the shoulders of the SEO. But I’ve been in this business long enough to know that SEO pros get blamed for things that they have no control over. So before you fire your web marketing team, make sure you know, without a doubt, that the fault lies with them. If you can make sure that none of the following items apply to you, then you’re free and clear to fire your SEO. If not, well, maybe you need to look internally before you stand firm in your certainty of where the blame lies. 7 Signs It’s You, Not Them 1. Your Campaign Is Too Narrow Ten years ago, you could get away with having a digital marketing campaign that focused only on keyword optimization and link building. But those days are long gone. Links continue to be an important part of a successful digital marketing campaign. Keyword optimization is still integral. But those two things alone will rarely get you the success you need with today’s algorithms. Possible? Yes. But it’s less and less likely due to all of the algorithm changes that have happened over the past five years. Today, you have to...

So, you want to kickstart your rankings? Well, it’s hard to blame you. Few things in the marketing world are as enticing as the prospect of generating traffic, leads, and sales passively. Who doesn’t want to sit back, do nothing, and make money? That’s right: no one. And the lucrativeness that SEO promises is no secret. 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine, 75% of users never scroll to the second page of results, and 70% to 80% of users completely ignore paid search advertisements. This means that if you get your website ranking organically on search engines, you’ll leverage all of that percentage potential. Unfortunately, you’re not the only one trying to do it. Since SEO offers so much promise, everyone with a website is trying to get their cut of SERP potential. That means that you’re going to have to compete with a lot of other websites to get to the top. In fact, 27.88% of marketing dollars go toward SEO. That’s a higher percentage than social media, PPC, and link building combined. But don’t get discouraged. Even though everyone is trying to climb to the top of the rankings, it doesn’t mean that you should give up. It just means you should spend more time, money, and energy than everyone else. Then, you’ll win. To do so, you need to know the SEO formulas that will rocket your website to the top of the search results. Here are five formulas that will do the trick. Formula #1: Use competitive analysis One great way to optimize your SEO efforts is to analyze the successful competition. What are they doing? How are they doing it? How much are they spending? And how can you mimic their efforts? These are all valid questions to ask when trying to determine what your competitors...

Tweet This <div _ngcontent-c30="" innerhtml=" In short, influencers should be reliable sources of information.“> <div _ngcontent-c30="" innerhtml=" “influence and audience aren’t the same thing.”“> <div _ngcontent-c23="" innerhtml=" Co-written with&nbsp;freelance&nbsp;Megan Leung Co-written with freelance Megan Leung First there were influencers. Then came micro-influencers. What next? Nano-influencers? As the trend carries on and brands get a whiff of influencer marketing, one question haunts many: What makes someone a so-called influencer? The Cambridge Dictionary defines influencer as “a person or group that has the ability to influence the behavior or opinions of others.” By and large, this isn’t a new thing. For centuries we’ve had philosophers, artists and activists. They were the influencers of the past. Today, nearly anyone with access to the Internet is claiming to be an influencer. Just add water (in the form of followers) and wait for lucrative corporate sponsorships to roll in: cha-ching! But there’s more to influence than audience size. Here’s a shortlist of what brands should look for before sealing deals with influencers. 1. Professional background and knowledge It’s common practice for businesses to screen potential employees. Influencers shouldn’t be an exception. It’s imperative for brands and businesses to look into an influencer’s education, professional history, industrial acumen, creative competence and likability. Mickael Romaniello, mobile developer at 2WAO Limited, shares that an influencer to him is a person with “high knowledge of their professional field.” Someone who isn’t only able to attract positive attention but also “someone whose experiences people can learn from.” Influencer knowledge and experience can be tested through interviews or informal chats. Their online profiles and credentials should always be verified and brands can benefit from seeing them as service providers rather than audience hunter-gatherers. 2. Ability to produce and improve creative output Bringing influencers on board mean employing additional creatives in the marketing team. They...

That latest post took days to develop. It’s instructive and inspiring and educational and entertaining. Easily, one of your best yet. But you come to check your traffic data only to find that you’re ranking 70th in the SERPs. In other words, you ain’t gettin no traffic anytime soon. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Unless some crazy person is actually clicking seven pages deep on Google. Which they aren’t. All of that hard work, research, and effort got you almost nothing in return. Meanwhile, your competitors are ranking in the top ten results, even though their content isn’t as long or thorough. Why? Because of Google. But really, the most likely answer is time and links. Your post is new, so it’s going to take some time. Knowing this, that doesn’t mean you can sit around and expect it to be on the first page without doing work. Thinking that your new post will gain thousands of links on its own is foolish. Outperforming your competitors on search engines isn’t an easy, one-off task. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, if you implement a few of these tactics, it’s likely that (in time) you will. Why? Because your competitors are comfortable. They think the rankings won’t ever change. You, on the other hand, are grinding to get ahead. Here’s how you can outperform sites ranking above you on search engines. The Top Two Ranking Factors, Straight From Google When Google RankBrain was announced in 2015 on Bloomberg, it was made known that RankBrain was the third most important ranking factor. But that was all they said. What about the first and second ranking factors? We got almost nothing for an entire year. In 2016, we got some clear information (for once) from Google. In a Q&A with Andrey Lipattsev, a...

Keywords are essential for inbound marketing. The thing is, it’s not easy finding the right keywords without help. A lot of online tools require you to pay a monthly or annual subscription, but there are perfectly good free alternatives out there, and it’s those we’re going to focus on. After all, what small business has good money to burn? Start with why, not what Before you start your search, make sure you know why you’re searching. Is it: For finding the right keywords for a blog idea you already have? Or Do you want to find the keywords that your audience might be searching to give you inspiration for what to write about in your content marketing? The six free tools for finding the right keywords that we explore in this post can be used for either, but before you hit the web, look within your own company for answers first. Who knows best? Think about it: who knows best what your customers are looking for? Your customers! Of course, it isn’t practical to ask every one of your customers what they commonly search for (although maybe ask a couple of your best), but there is another option: talk to your team. Your sales team will – hopefully – have kept notes from their discovery calls with your clients. These notes will include the pain points clients were dealing with when they found your company. Your customer service department also regularly talks with your clients. Ask them what the most common questions are and see if you can turn them into blog posts. Addressing these issues matches the last stage of the inbound marketing methodology: delight. Being intuitive and working out what your customers want before they have to ask for it is a sure-fire way to build their trust....

If you’ve been doing SEO for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly experienced your fair share of failures. And in many cases, frustratingly, the SEO program itself was not the issue. While I’ve discussed meta topics such as management challenges, getting executive buy-in, and the need for flexibility in the past, I haven’t directly addressed the question, “What do you do if SEO isn’t your SEO problem?” As search marketers, we work our tails off analyzing data, search results, client websites and more, with the goal of providing recommendations that will move the needle. Unfortunately, the best recommendations in the world don’t matter if they aren’t implemented — and therein lies one of the biggest challenges of SEO. Let’s look at a few common obstacles that can hinder an SEO program’s progress and discuss how we can overcome them. Just following up We’ve all been there: You’ve sent one, two, three emails and still have heard nothing back. How can you possibly get anything done if the client won’t even answer your emails? It’s not a simple solution. People are busy; they have other priorities, and it’s our job to ensure our clients understand the importance and value of the program. If a contact goes silent, there are a few options we can try. Pick up the phone Your clients are busy people, and many of them probably receive dozens or even hundreds of emails per day. That’s a lot of messages to sort through! While it can be frustrating to not receive a response, it’s possible your contact has more important emails to get through. Pick up the phone. It’s so simple, yet we often forgot to do it. In the age of technology, everyone is emailing and texting. Talking to someone can go a long way. Use an email tracker If your...

In last week’s #SEMrushchat, we talked about an exceptionally important topic: how brand authority interacts with SEO as a ranking factor, since we just released our newest study: the 17 most prominent Google ranking factors. We invited expert, Jennifer Slegg – founder & editor of The SEM Post, speaker, and author of Understanding Google Panda Algo Guide. Along with her and our other guests, we focused on questions like how to identify a good brand authority, how authority influences rankings, and how PR and SEO can, and should, interact. Here is what they had to say: Q1. How do you identify a good brand authority? What are the main metrics you would use? There are three factors that come into play: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Expertise is your knowledge level and the value you can provide on any given subject. Expertise is your knowledge level and the value you can provide on any given subject. Your authority is how established your brand is, both in your industry and online. Trustworthiness is how much customers and industry peers trust that you, your content, and your products and services are all top-notch. When it comes to measuring these factors, there are a number of metrics to look at in order to get the full picture, all of which can individually strengthen your search rank. Often times, branded search volume increases as a brand becomes better known. Once upon a time, people didn't include words such as "Amazon" "eBay" or even "Pinterest" in their Google/Bing/etc searches. #semrushchat — Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) November 15, 2017 There are several ways to measure this. The first is branded search volume, or how many people are searching for you by name. Instead of searching for “sneakers,” for example, someone might search for “Nike sneakers” due to the...